


The Mer

by Ardwynna



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Ficlet, Gen, Loneliness, Mythology - Freeform, inspired by fairytales, merfolk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 13:29:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20471810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardwynna/pseuds/Ardwynna
Summary: The first time Sephiroth saw the mermaid was on the way to Wutai.





	The Mer

The first time he saw the mermaid was on the way to Wutai. He had gone to the prow and leaned over the rail to watch the surf rise and split and fall away from the rushing hull. There were fish there, and dolphins, leaping and flying across the water, catching the momentum and riding the wave. They clicked and whistled and flipped and turned, fearless and free. And then there she was, a young thing with her tail shimmering green and her hair seaweed dark as she joined their games. 

He drew back and looked around, wondering if he should tell someone. But the crew were too busy to pay much mind to the company’s strange young cargo. He turned back to the water. She caught his eye on the crest of a wave. Her mouth opened into a gasp. She tumbled in the water and disappeared beneath the waves. 

He had to put her aside after that. There was no room in a war for fairytales. Ghost stories, perhaps. He wrote those in steel by the hundreds and thousands, each day hoping not to become one himself. People came and went. He began to forget, or think of the mer as a child’s imagination, remembering of her only in half-sleep in the dead of night, when the battle was over and the air was too still. 

The second time he saw the mermaid was chance. The transport had failed and touched down for repairs. He left the crew busy behind him and wandered down the beach, seeking solitude. It was cold this high north. The waters were grey and unwelcoming. And off down the way, in the distance, he saw her sitting up on the rocks. 

She was older now, and wringing her hair dry in the sun. Skin gave way to scales and fins and her shimmering tail disappeared beneath the water. He opened his mouth, drawing breath to speak. He was never sure again if she had heard it. Their eyes met again, hers as green as memory. He smiled and was not sure why, perhaps only from knowing now that she was real. For a moment he thought she might have smiled back. But someone called his name and she leapt like a fish, arching against the setting sun to disappear again beneath the waves. 

Some things never changed, but other things did. He was taller now, and older, and had the weight of the war behind him, and what he wanted he could get, to a certain extent. Trouble brewed around him, but he paid it no mind. City lights flickered and the people moaned. Concrete cracked. Steel pillars buckled and bent. The ones in charged heaped the blame and the curses. The war had stretched resources thin with no profit to show for it, and the mako was running dry. Voices were raised and there was a woman to blame but he had no idea how. 

There was still work, even without the war. Artifacts to be hunted, to be retrieved from dangerous places and escorted in safety. He read and learned what he could about them as he went back and forth across the skies, taking the relics from their ancient resting places. Tablets to piece together. Old scrolls to translate. Shards of strange materia and elegant staffs, and the researchers and scientists puzzled over the meaning and measure, searching for the map, the key, the answer to the unrest and their dwindling world. If only she hadn’t run, went the lamentations from the older ones, or the ones long enough employed to be in the know. There was so much she could have shared. And it was a shame about the baby too. 

They sent him for recordings from an abandoned house, one with the faintest trace of a familiar scent and an ancient blood stain on the floor. There was a trail too, out the door and down the steps. It was years old and its secrets were hidden by the snow. He assured everyone that he had not looked at the tapes when he returned. The house was cold and the machinery was old, and the recordings wouldn’t play on any device currently on the market anyway. He put their questioning out of his head and kept his eye out the window on the flight back.

He sought the water anytime he traveled, wondering if she was beneath, if he could spot her from such a height. The idle search helped pass the time. Even in the crumbling city, it was something to do, in between the arrests and unrest and the lights dimming and going out. The stories he found were old and few and only for children. Tales of ancient love across land and sea. Of witches and trades and drops of blood. Of tails and fins becoming legs and feet, of abandoning everything for a chance, the slightest hint of a different life. None of it was real, not one bit, as everyone knew. He did not bother to correct them. 

One day they took more of his blood than usual and were furious afterwards that it wasn’t enough. He lay in placid recovery in a quiet room and imagined a different life. The remains of his blood rushed like the ocean in his ears. He fell asleep and dreamed of waves, of riding the current and letting it take him far beneath.

He went once more to the house in the snow, escorting and guarding a team of the alleged best. There was blood on those stairs, old and dried and weathered as it was. He watched as the boards were torn up, as stone was chipped away. It would have to do, the scientists grumbled, it would have to do. He watched as they sampled dirt, hoping for a trace of something long gone, unless it could possibly lie preserved beneath two decades of snow. The markers marked the trail where they would have to dig. It was a long, straight line from the village, a bee-line escape, not the best for dodging bullets, as he well knew. 

The scientists complained. It was cold, and the work was arduous, and finicky for frozen fingers. It would have saved them so much work now if someone had had the sense to stop her before she ran. They could have at least caught the baby. He pretended not to hear them and went to scout ahead, citing safety as the excuse. He followed the markers to the land’s edge and looked down into the storm-dark sea. 

The third time he saw the mermaid, he joined her. He stepped off the cliff as easily as her mother had two decades before. Cold waters closed over him, and he saw green eyes in the dark as she followed him down. If tails and fins could become legs and feet, maybe it went the other way too. He wasn’t sure if it worked like that for everyone or only a chosen few, if it even worked that way at all. 

The stories didn’t say.


End file.
